Library@Church

Don't know why we didn't have this idea before. But we finally got there. It was the link from Cafe Church to coffee shops in bookshops that made us realise.

Fundamentally, the concept of Library@Church is that both institutions can, at their best, produce feelings of awe through the creative use of silence and the stimulation of the mind and spirit.

So Young Keith has spent all night erecting the bookshelves in the Moot House and filling them with improving books. It's a pretty good selection - at the last count he had 45 second-hand copies of "The Road Less Travelled", 92 remaindered volumes of Tony Blair's "My Journey"  and his own copy of "Steven Gerrard - My Story". At 9.30 we'll open up, and people will be allowed in to wander, muse and chill out in the respectful atmosphere. Although we're expecting a bit of a fight over the Gerrard book.

At 11am, to make Library@Church more exciting, we'll introduce a coffee shop, and a bunch of Peruvian traditional puppeteers will present their Inca-language version of "Strangers on a Train".

Then while everyone's at lunch, we'll rip out half the bookshelves and replace them with an Internet Cafe. But ensure that none of the worship leaders (or "librarians", as we're calling them today) are able to service the PCs if anything goes wrong. People will be able to use our on-line service to look up the exciting books that are available in other Beaker Library@Church establishments around the country.

Then, to provide that authentic "Library" experience, we're going to close Library@Church down and throw everybody out. In future everyone will instead have to wait for the mobile Library@Church, which will come round in a van for twenty minutes once a fortnight till the diesel runs out.

All the books however will be shipped round and used as fuel for my book-burning stove. It's an ill wind, I say.